I am taking a trip back to Rochester for 4 days. I’m looking forward to cool weather, as the heat index in Belize for September and the first few weeks of October was between 100-110F daily. I’m also excited to have a break from the bugs. In my apartment, no matter how much I scrub the place, there are bugs on me constantly. If I make a sandwich and leave it, or a utensil, on the counter unattended, there will be ants on it within minutes. Ants are in the bed, and on me if I’m in bed! Each morning I wake up with new mosquito bites though I apply DEET bugspray each night.

Admittedly, I’ve been getting frustrated with these physical discomforts, as well as feeling helpless in the face of the poverty that surrounds me. As an example, the family across the road from me, when I was living next to Judy, was selling the daughters for sex in order to put food on the table, (which of course resulted in more babies to feed). In the house I moved to on the north side of Hopkins, another neighbor just started a job cleaning at one of the Hopkins resorts, for what she considers a good wage of about $30Bz/day ($15 US dollars/day) to support herself and her daughter.

Since hotel and flight prices are currently cheap in Cancun, I’m spending a couple days here in Cancun, en route to Rochester. What a way to jolt me out of my third world existence! Cancun is the antithesis to Hopkins. Despite all of the complaints I’ve just detailed above, I’d choose Hopkins over Cancun any day. The people I’ve met in Hopkins are the most open-hearted and generous people I’ve ever come across. Most are down-to-earth, they look me in the eye when they talk to me, and they are genuine in what they say, even if it might offend me. Here in Cancun, humanism has been sacrificed for the sake of commercialism. Yesterday, I was looking at some silver earrings in a market, and when I told the shop-owner that I was going to think about it and maybe come back later, he followed me out of the store and yelled after me, “You’re a liar, you’re all liars!” Then I made the mistake of getting suckered into attending a time-share sales pitch, which was a colossal waste of time and energy. So today, I plan to go to the beach and try to forget about the inequities in the world. I’m already looking forward to returning to Hopkins!